


Cellulose Acetate

by bocje_ce_ustu



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Charles too, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It should be about Alzheimer's disease but really it's more of a burnt out telepath version of it, Logan Needs A Hug, M/M, Past Character Death, Telepathy, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-26
Updated: 2016-11-26
Packaged: 2018-09-02 10:50:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8664775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bocje_ce_ustu/pseuds/bocje_ce_ustu
Summary: At first it is terrifying and, in a way, heartbreakingly beautiful, not unlike watching a star dying in fast forward.





	1. Logan

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissGillette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissGillette/gifts).



> Based on the prompt: “Inspired by [plot synopsis](http://missgillette.tumblr.com/post/151438581093/more-logan-story-details-paint-a-grim-future) of _Logan_ aka the last Wolverine trilogy film: Logan is elderly Charles’ caretaker, and Charles suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. Logan comes back to Charles’ room in the mansion from errands/teaching or what have you to find Charles leafing through a photo album and not recognizing Logan. It’s one of “those” days for them. So, Logan spends the evening talking to Charles and going through the album with him, putting him to bed later that night hoping tomorrow won’t be a repeat”.
> 
> Happy holidays!  
> As you’ll discover, I tried shifting the focus from an actual experience of Alzheimer's disease, which with my scarce medical expertise I could hardly do justice to, to a growing instability in Charles’ (and Logan's) powers.  
> Anyway, I apologize in advance for any mistakes - and for the amounts of Cherik I strongly believed I wouldn't put in here, only to find myself writing it. But this I blame on my great-aunt, who in the earlier stages of her illness kept recalling with dreamy eyes her youth and her late husband.  
> That said, I hope you enjoy!

At first it is terrifying and, in a way, heartbreakingly beautiful, not unlike watching a star dying in fast forward.

Your gaze enraptured by the explosion of colors and light, you document each infinitesimal change shot after cherished shot, only for you to realize in the end you're too late to do anything about it.

One day you just feel happy, and the people around you seem to share your buoyant mood. You actually end up being kinder than you ought to to that douche Summers, which feels nice for a change, and you think Charles will be proud of you.

These harmless, little things are what makes them drop their guard, setting the course for the things to come, things that aren't as nice.

The symptoms were there, if you wanted to look closely enough, which was something he tried his best not to do, if he could help it. And, from the looks he sometimes gets from Hank, his trademark long-suffering sigh gradually losing the familiar heat, or the way Scott’s tone grows uncomfortably lively as he struggles to move to safer conversational grounds, or even how Ororo’s eyebrows skyrocket to her hairline and her voice just trails off, he knows that's what everyone else has been doing. Ignoring the issue, in the childish, hopeless hope it would go away on its own.

But it isn’t going anywhere, as Jean says exasperatedly when she comes visiting from the west coast branch.

“We could ignore it if it were a nudge telling us we absolutely need to have a chocolate sundae for lunch, but as it is, it’s like a nudge towards an ice cream stand in the middle of a minefield.”

“More like a mindfield,” Scott mutters under his breath, and as uncalled for as that is, no one disagrees. It’s not like they aren’t thinking the same thing.

Just the other day, on a trip to the city mall with their fourth and fifth graders, Charles inadvertently froze an entire intersection in the well-meaning attempt to prevent two pedestrians from knocking into each other in a corner of the sidewalk. Luckily, Pietro always gets bored on the school grounds, so he was taking a stroll nearby when it happened – which, in terms of Maximoff strolls, meant he was right back with his sisters in tow. Even so, it took all of their powers combined to prevent the subsequent three car crashes and move to safety the people stuck in the middle of the street.

That is a major incident in a whole lot of minor ones that have been going on for a while now and that, since that day at the mall, have been shared in hushed tones among staff and students alike like unheeded warning signs.

Ororo revealed that one day she just felt like raining, for no reason at all, and only after did she remember how the Professor had smiled up at her and chatted away about the splash of water on stone tiles, and how that helped ease his thoughts more than anything else.

Angel told he once found himself right on his parents’ doorstep and, waking up horrified at the prospect of what he had been about to do, he turned on his heels, got back to school and asked Charles never to meddle in his personal choices again. Only Charles had looked at him in mild surprise and said that, even though he didn’t know anything about sending him home, his parents surely couldn’t have done anything so unforgivable as to justify such loathing.

If Logan once found himself in Lincoln Memorial without any memory of getting there, and Charles smiling happily at his side patting his arm and whispering, _Just like the old times_ , no one has to know.

Day after day, bit by bit, those carefully erected walls Charles built to keep the world from pouring in are now crumbling, worn away by old age and an illness not even Hank has a cure for.

And there they are, a sad, helpless circle of misfits studying their shoelaces, not much different from the days before he found them and gave them a purpose. Now that their leader is losing himself, they are lost as well.

 

***

 

The most difficult thing is not, however, ignoring those little, insistent pushes that sometimes come in the form of strange itches at the back of your head, giving form to unknown desires or voice to strenuously quelled fears. Those you can’t ignore. They’re there, and once they’re there they are real, and you’ve taken the step and rolled the dice and only in retrospect you find you’ve never had that choice to begin with.

The most difficult thing, though, is watching Charles as he gradually becomes aware of what’s happening.

When it happens, when his powers escape his grasp, eluding his control and actually moving the strings of the people around him, there's no telling if he notices at all. Hank says he _blends_ , that Charles loses himself so deep into someone else he forgets he’s making calls he has no claims upon. When Charles blends, he’s effectively someone else, so those are his feelings, his choices, his life.

But when he comes back, and that's the worst part of it all, he doesn’t always know where he’s been or why. He just feels something doesn’t add up, and he grows restless, and his powers grow more erratic and wilder in turn.

When he’s back to himself, Charles is lost in his own body, in and to his own mind.

And just as he begins to understand what is wrong with him, his mind and body fail him once again.

The holes in his memory deepen and, as blending gets less frequent but no less unpredictable, Charles starts forgetting his own gift. Maybe it's the black hole after the supernova, or maybe the usual boundaries have expanded so much that his powers are too far away to be called back. Be that as it may, it becomes clearer with every passing day that his powers are getting weaker, his technique sloppier, and it’s getting harder and harder for him to rely on his gift to tell himself apart from the others.

When asked about it, Hank just shrugs his shoulders helplessly. “He’s like an anchorless ship in a storm.” 

 _Then let’s get him an anchor_ , Logan thinks.

Which is, of course, the wrong thing to do.

 

***

 

They corner him near Charles’ former study, Ororo silently jerking her head towards the entrance and Jean marking him up close and shutting the door behind her back. There’s a tiny fraction of time where he can still hear the noises of class recess unfolding through the halls, and then,

“Logan, seriously? Keeping an open channel to and from Charles’ mind?”

His gaze goes from Ororo, brow furrowed in concern and open-mouthed confusion, to Jean, whose silent accusation is written all over her face. She doesn’t need words to voice his opinion on the matter, and he doesn’t need words to knows that she’s fuming and barely keeping herself from hauling the antique wooden globe at him.

Logan breaths in and out carefully. “I only did the one thing I could do to help him.” He doesn’t want to fight with her, but it’s Charles they’re talking about, and he’ll always fight for Charles.

“How do you know you’re not making things worse?” Jean retorts. “He’s not in control of his powers anymore. He could make you do anything and you wouldn’t even notice! Or worse, he could wake up one day convinced he’s an immortal, invulnerable mutant with an adamantium skeleton. What he needs is someone who knows how this works. Who knows how his powers work.”

“Then why don’t you stay?” Logan sticks his chin out and dares her to answer. Judging from the frown wavering on Ororo's face, he can't be that wrong after all. “Why don’t you just stay and try something?” Jean saw the problem ahead of anyone else, and she ran away once. Logan doesn’t see why she bothers if she’s going to run away again.

“I am not running away,” she hisses. “I have duties, Logan. A school to run. This is what Charles asked of me, and this is what I’m going to do, no matter what you make of it.”

“You’re fucking scared of this, is what I make of it,” Logan bites out, just this side of an honest-to-God growl. “And you are, whatever you’re telling yourself to feel better. But you know what?” His gaze shifts from Jean to Ororo. Jean may feel their discomfort alright, but it's Ororo the one who has been here since the start. Logan hopes that she, at least, will understand. “We’re all scared. But Charles is scared too. Somebody needs to do something about it, and if there’s something, anything I can do to help instead of sitting around doing nothing, then I will do that.”

 _No matter the consequences._ The words hang up in the air, unsaid yet deafening. He stares right at Jean and exits the study, the door rattling on its hinges on his way out.

“Dammit, Logan!”

 

***

 

Today it’s one of _those days_ , as Hank calls them. One of the increasingly recurrent days when their tether isn't enough. Logan contents himself with a more direct, sincerely put _shit, not again_ , which must somehow come loud and clear through their shaky connection enough that Charles sometimes will look straight at him, a deep frown marring his forehead, and ‘say shit, not again’ himself, and Logan hopes against hope that it’s a conscious comment, not an automated echo of his thoughts.

When he goes up to Charles' room tonight, Charles is looking at the photo album he keeps in his night table’s drawer. It’s a thick, sturdy old thing with a blue leather cover torn at the corners, ranging from some ancestor whose name was forgotten a few generation earlier to photos from school trips, social gatherings and life on the school grounds. This is what Charles calls the _real thing_ , the album that sums up all the meaningful events in his life. There are other albums in his study – yearbooks picturing decades of school life, detailed photographic accounts of seminars and board meetings – but this is more personal, this is Charles’s, and recently it has become for him an anchor to his memories.

Most days he finds him drawn to the earliest pages, where in grainy blacks and whites and the first glorious Cibachromes are the photos from the Oxford years and the ’60s. It’s both bizarre and more than a little unnerving to watch his fingers brush over the discolored corners of the picture of a young Magneto lost in thought, captured on film as he sat with his legs dangling from a balustrade and looking into the distance. ‘Rage and serenity,’ Charles said to him once in a clear, unwavering voice, looking up from the picture with an intense gaze that Logan thought was probably meant for someone else.

It isn’t his fault that that someone else is gone now. It isn’t his fault he’s gone and Logan is here instead – has always been here, through all of this – and it isn’t his fault that Charles remembers him and not Logan, most of the time.

Still, he can’t help a sick guilt from surging within him every time Charles asks about Erik (foreign, queer syllables that feels out of place in Logan’s mind, yet sound so natural on Charles’ tongue it almost looks he practices them every day and night – and come to think of it, he probably does), and he has to choose whether this is a day for truth or cowardice.

The first time Charles asked it caught him off-guard, and he ended up blurting it all out despite himself. At first Charles thought he was joking, but then he just shrugged and muttered that Erik had always said it was them against the humans, after all. After that he wept until well into the night, apologizing repeatedly about it saying he didn't quite know what had gotten into him.

‘First he says he wants me by his side’ is what Charles pouts when Logan lets cowardice win and outright lies to him, making up something along the lines of a dumb mutant supremacist plan that Magneto would think genius, no doubt. ‘And then he won’t even come and say hi’. Sometimes he'll just stare at his lifeless legs and grumble something about apologies long overdue, making Logan wonder how far his mind has taken him this time.

But even when he lies, most times the tendrils of Charles’ wild, fickle powers will see through it and call his bluff, and then there’s no telling if what follows will be desperate sobbing, blunt rage, or the hysterical laugh that occurred only once, and Logan wishes never to relive.

This time, though, it looks like Charles is somewhere in the middle of the album, which is probably a good thing, if that means no heartbreaks for the (more than timely, if you ask Logan) death of former lovers for the night. Or maybe that just means more heartbreaks for him if they’re going to go through the part of Charles’ life with Logan in it. The part where Logan is now no more than a smudge of color on resin and paper, or yet another anonymous silhouette on cellulose acetate.

“Hey,” he says, crossing the room and approaching the bed in careful steps, the way Hank said it would be best not to upset Charles should he be confused or frightened by his presence.

“Hi,” Charles says back, looking him up and down a little warily as he scoots over to make room for Logan on the edge of the bed. Logan feels the telltale itch in the back of his head that means Charles is slowly figuring him out. Images flickers before his mind’s eye, pried out by sloppy fingers, and Logan lets the anger and fear and pain slice their way through him because if anything is worth of it, this is.

A hand covers Logan’s in his lap.

“Logan.” Charles offers him a shaky smile, and his hold tightens on their connection. “Maybe you can help me with this.” His other hand taps onto the album which, Logan can see it now, is open at the page of the inauguration of the Danger Room, with a younger Raven stubbornly ignoring the camera to carry on with her stern official introduction to the trainees. “I think I…” Charles worries his lip, pensively, and the itch in the back of Logan’s head makes a new, brief appearance “… must have written this.” His finger pauses on the paper, caressing the messy cursive in navy blue, and he looks up at Logan again for confirmation. Logan nods.

“Good!” Charles’ eyes light up and he gazes at Logan with renewed interest. “Then you can tell me what this place is.”

So they begin again, Charles slowly leafing through the album and pointing at faces and reading the names and dates at the bottom out loud, tentatively putting together piece after piece as Logan recalls an episode here and there to tie with the people and places in the pictures. _This is from when you went to oversee the rebuilding in Cairo. That’s Scott’s motorcycle. Well, it’s not exactly Scott’s, but after it got into a car crash it was pretty useless and then you told me I couldn’t just leave it at that…_ When Charles gets too tired to read, Logan takes over, keeping his descriptions as short and clear as he can, trusting Charles to change the pace at will, stopping him on a picture he wants to know more about and skipping over the ones that don’t catch his eye. They spend an hour or two just doing that, and Logan doesn’t know if it’s more a testament to the vacuity of the act that by now Logan has mastered his recaps to polished perfection or the fact that the most mundane detail still seems to blow Charles’ mind.

_This is pointless._

The intensity and truth of that thought is such that, for a moment, Logan could swear he had thought it. Then he turns to Charles, sees the white-knuckled grip creasing the edge of the album, the lips sealed in a thin line as if he bit into a lemon, and doesn’t need the words that follow to know what Charles is thinking.

“I keep looking at faces and names, but no matter how long I keep doing that, how hard I keep trying to hold on to them, they will be just faces and names in the end. Spatters of color and squiggles of ink.”

“Like the Buendías,” Logan mumbles, more to keep himself from saying anything else.

“Like what?” Charles says, slowly, as if he’s still trying to trace back the meaning of Logan’s words to some piece of their conversation, but he’s unsure if there’s an actual conversation to look back to at all.

“Never mind.” Logan closes the photo album and puts it back onto the night table, where Charles can easily find it next time. “It’s late, how about we get you ready for bed?”

Charles furrows his brow in mild confusion, but when he takes in Logan’s relaxed stance and his silent ask for permission to help him out of bed, he nods. Logan carefully lifts the coverlet, picks him up by hooking his arms around his shoulders and beneath his knees under Charles’ inquisitive gaze, and walks them into the bathroom.

 

***

 

“I’m going to check in on the kids,” Logan says once he has put Charles back to bed and tucked him in. “See they don’t empty the pantry overnight and the like. I’ll be back before you know.” He’s about to get up from the bed when Charles stops him with a hand on his wrist.

“Stay. Please.” The urgency in his voice and eyes are almost enough for Logan to cave in. “You know I’ll forget you if you go… and I don’t want that,” Charles adds in a hushed tone, smoothing out the creases on his coverlet. “You’re…” for a moment he struggles against the words, and then goes for a “… good to me. I don’t want to forget that.”

“You won’t, Chuck,” Logan replies, planting a kiss on Charles’ forehead before getting up. “‘Cause I’ll always be around to remind you.”

And that, he muses as he steps out of the door and turns off the lights, that has been the problem all along. He will always be around, and he has let himself forget Charles won’t be there too.

 

 


	2. Charles

At first it is terrifying and, in a way, extremely liberating. The chains grounding him disappear, and he feels his mind floating as if fluctuating unbound in an endless fluid. An ocean of possibilities expands all around him, overwhelmingly close at hand. All he has to do is seize them, and the world will be his.

The world is his already, he realizes soon after. Better yet, the world is _him_ , just as he is the world. He is everyone, and bit by bit, he finds himself full to the brim, high on sensation, his conscience deepened and broadened to embrace every self on its path to become one and only with it.

He is a boy running along a path in the woods, feeling the sun on his skin, his forehead glistening with sweat and the bittersweet ache of fatigue in his knees. And he is fifty-seven, her hair is thin and her nails are bitten, and maybe she’s not perfect but she can have this, and God is this good, she’s never stopping kissing this man again. And he is Em, and the air is lovely tonight on the porch, if you just close your eyes and breath in, you can smell the sea. And his life is over, now that Mattie won’t even look his way, and he may as well not show up his face at school ever again, and doesn’t this track describe his pain so perfectly?

Emboldened, he dives in, revels into sensation, into the sparks of newly made discoveries, feelings, misunderstandings, deep into that luminous, bubbling core that is the breeding ground of ideas.

That’s a good place to be, he decides, and maybe, just maybe, why not, he could stay here for a while.

 

***

 

It is easy enough to joke about it, in the beginning, when he still remembers what it is that’s happening to him. At least, he feels that if he did, then a little of that tension building up among his friends, staff and students would ease off.

Yes, he is losing his memory, worse, he is losing his sense of self with it, and every time he comes back he’s less sure of what he’s done and even less sure he’d want to know. Yes, he is falling to pieces, and there are so many shards of silver glass on the ground he can’t possibly pick them all up before the others follow suit, and in the end he only gets his palms cut and a dreadful sense that somehow, around the corner, there are countless years of bad luck with his name written on them. Yes, every day he wakes up from dreams with faceless people to a world with nameless faces, and as time goes by, even the sense that never failed to help him figure out the outer world is gradually failing him, jumping into action at its free will and lagging behind when Charles needs it the most.

But what use is crying about it, when he perfectly knows there will be a time where he will be so lost to himself – and anyone else, really – then he won’t feel like doing anything other than lie down and weep until he forgets even what he is weeping for?

So Charles laughs about it, urging both students and staff to hang tags onto things and places with a detailed account of their names, purpose and use, in the eventuality that those first symptoms of his are just the beginning of a collective García Márquez-esque amnesia.

Needless to say, most of the students rejoice at the possibility, looking forward to the day where they would be fully justified if none of them understood a word of the assigned chapter from _The Once and Future King_.

But as far as that kind of preventive measure goes - not much, as Macondo's inhabitants find out at their expense - the strategy is flawed from the start. While you could tag stuff and places indeed, you couldn’t certainly tag _people_.

“Actually you could.” Logan walks up to the side of the bed and leans down onto the mattress, next to Charles’ legs. Charles doesn’t need to feel the warmth seeping through from his body to heat up from the buzz of affection radiating off of him. There’s something else there too, though, something beyond the unabashed love and care, a spark Charles identifies when Logan reaches for the dog tags around his neck, showing them off to him with a wicked grin.

“Hey,” Charles looks at them appraisingly, drawing Logan up close to him with a slight pull on the tag chain, “these sure are handy.” He revels in Logan’s touch, Logan’ hands cupping the back of his head, his mouth breathing hot air into his ear.

“And you know what the best thing is?” Logan murmurs, unhurriedly making his way down the shell of Charles’ ear, licking and nipping.

Charles knows, but he’s a little winded yet, and besides, every word coming from Logan’s mouth is a cherished gift. And Logan, knowing Charles knows and he’s waiting for Logan to tell him, goes on to say, “You get to write on it.”

Charles’ breath hitches when Logan closes his lips around the lobe, and a golden thread lights up somewhere in the back of his mind when Charles feels his voice closer still.

_So tell me, love, what are you gonna write?_

 

***

 

“I’m not doing that,” Charles repeats for the umpteenth time in the last five minutes. Why does Logan keep insisting on it? Hasn’t he been clear enough on the risks that a full-time, unlimited connection could imply?

Logan sighs, reverting to a somehow familiar stance that manages to raise his hackles instantly. They’ve barely spoken for ten minutes, and this guy already gets on his nerves!

“We’ve discussed this,” Logan says again, with that low, husky voice that should be added to a firearm regulation list, if you ask Charles. “All I ask is that you trust me on this. We’ve done this before, and nothing bad ever happened.” There’s the tiniest bite at his bottom lip at that, but that’s more than enough for Charles to call him out on his lie. He knew he shouldn’t trust this man. Nothing good ever happens from fiddling with his own mind, Charles knows that perfectly well. Or, at any rate, he must have known perfectly well. There must be a very good reason for it, only one he can’t seem to recall right now. Among other things. Like any other conversation with this man ever in his life.

“You’re a liar,” Charles says, resolutely. “A liar who likes to take advantage of his elders.”

“You think I’m a liar?” The man looks nonplussed. He takes Charles’ hand before he can pull it back and places it on his temple. “See that for yourself.”

“I can’t.” Charles shakes his head, tries to wrest his hand from the man’s grip but he holds on tight, looking straight at him with a strange determination in his eyes. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” he chants, raising his free hand to swat at the liar’s face and the hand relentlessly gripping his.

“You can,” the man says, blocking his other hand at the wrist with his own. “Don’t you see?” _You’re already here._

 

***

 

They must have done this together a lot of times, Charles thinks as his wearied attention shifts from Logan’s words to the quality of his voice, warm and low, and his big hands holding up the album as he speaks, a fine web of light scars mapping his knuckles and forearms, almost hidden underneath the dark hair. Some scars look newer than the rest, shining in bright reds that slowly recede into pinks as he watches.

Logan notices his gaze has drifted off the pages and thin lines wrinkle his forehead as he asks him if he’d rather call it a night. A part of Charles is more than ready to agree, but another fears that once Logan ends narrating, he’ll be left alone again, and that fear alone is strong enough to keep sleep at bay. And then, there’s something about this man. It's like a spider’s web dangling between two trees you can see only as the sun hits it from a certain angle, and Charles only manages to get glimpse of it now and then, during their conversation. It’s like he can feel him closer and farther in turns, washing up to and away from his conscience like the tide, and Charles feels like he can’t let him go if he doesn’t know what it is.

So he shakes his head and begs Logan to go on.

Logan obliges, turning the page on another set of photos. As he rearranges his hold onto the book, though, a film strip falls from the back end, landing into Charles’ lap.

He picks it up, exposing it to the light and squinting at the tiny silhouettes impressed inside the frames.

“What are these?”

Logan leans closer to have a better look, then leafs through the album backwards until it opens onto a page where, in the upper left, three young men in garish clothes stare up at the camera. It must be the ’70s, Charles realizes, though he can't tell for sure what makes him so certain of that. Before he can dwell on it, another thing catches his eye.

“This is you,” Charles points at the man in the middle, with spiky hair and a bored face, and turns to Logan for a quick once over. “You do look a little younger here,” he says, allowing himself a bit of teasing there. Logan shoots him a confused glance, but doesn’t say anything. _So he really believes he’s immortal_ , Charles muses, and promises himself to hold onto this piece of information for future reference, before going back to the picture. “And this,” he adds, pointing his finger at the man on the left with a purple shirt and filthy hair. “It can’t be…”

But Logan is already nodding. “This is you. You’re a little bit younger yourself,” he laughs, pointing then at the third man on the right. “Hank insisted on having pictures taken when we met in the ’70s, so that he had a proof I was really there with you, and not some kind of optical illusion or trick of the mind.”

If there’s some clue there he ought to pick up, he hopes Logan will let it slide.

“Were you?”

“What?”

“A trick of the mind.”

“Yes and no,” Logan says, offering him a cryptic smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “But I did appear on paper, right? So more a yes than a no.”

 

***

 

It’s late when Logan gets up and offers to help him get ready for bed. No words are spoken between them, and yet, it’s like the invisible thread carries the meaning in between. Charles feels this thread getting stronger the more they stay close together like this, and again, he fears it may just tear up if Logan leaves.

“Stay,” Charles pleads, not caring if begging makes him look needy and clingy. He tries to explain with words what he feels, tries to keep him near just a little more, but Logan only kisses him on his forehead and leaves with a promise to be back soon that Charles holds onto like a precious gift.

The door closes, shutting off even the last strip of light onto the floor.

As the stillness of the night settles on his frayed nerves, Charles finds he is very tired. So very tired, indeed, he soon feels his mind drifting into unconsciousness, a carefully crafted thread of a spider’s web lingering one moment still before the darkness and silence of the room envelop him.

 

 

 

 


End file.
